I have a HTML file
...<b>Breakfast</b><hr>...
I want Breakfast which is between > and <.
I tried
...for test_string in line:
if re.match(r'(>.*<$)',test_string):...
That didn't give >Breakfast< either.
Thank you.
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Vinayak Garg
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He Drunh
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Why did you include `$`? – Cameron Jan 22 '12 at 06:45
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possible duplicate of [Whats the regular expression for finding string between " "](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3066328/whats-the-regular-expression-for-finding-string-between) – Ken White Jan 22 '12 at 06:46
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1You should look at something like this: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ – Chris Cooper Jan 22 '12 at 06:46
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7As usual, with anything involving HTML and Regexes: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/118068 – Marc B Jan 22 '12 at 06:51
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possible duplicate of [RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) – outis Jan 22 '12 at 22:44
3 Answers
4
In general regular expression can't parse html. You could use an html parser instead:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup # pip install BeautifulSoup
html = """...<b>Breakfast</b><hr>..."""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print soup(text=True) # get all text
# -> [u'...', u'Breakfast', u'...']
print [b.text for b in soup('b')] # get all text for <b> tags
# -> [u'Breakfast']
jfs
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The $ means "end of input" and doesn't belong in this regex.
Instead, do the following:
m = re.search(r'>([^<]*)<', test_string)
if m:
print m.group(1)
This searches for >, then all the following characters that are not <, and then <. The characters betweens > and < are marked as a group, which you get using m.group(1)
dorsh
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How is `[^<]*<` better than `.*?<` in this use case? Surely they are translated to the same code internally. – kindall Jan 22 '12 at 06:54
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1@kindall, yes, the `[^<]*` is slightly more efficient http://pastebin.com/jNArurPw – reclosedev Jan 22 '12 at 07:35
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I think you want:
r'(>.*?<)'
Or maybe
r'<b(>.*?<)/b>'
which is non-greedy and matches in the middle of a string. Note that parsing HTML with regular expressions is not very robust.
